Ultan Byrne
Finance Manager · 11-50
1 review written · 3.0 average
Ultan Byrne's favourite software
No favourites yet.
Reviews by Ultan Byrne
★★★★★
Reporting is the thing I keep coming back to, both to praise and to complain about. On the positive side, Wave gives you a decent set of out-of-the-box reports: profit and loss, cash flow, balance sheet. For a free tool, that's genuinely impressive, and when I first set it up for our team three years ago I didn't expect it to hold up as we grew past twenty people. It mostly has. The dashboard is clean, loading is fast, and I can pull a quick snapshot of where we stand at any given moment without digging through menus.
Where it falls apart is depth. Once you need anything beyond the standard templates, you're stuck. There's no custom report builder to speak of. I can't filter by department, I can't build a rolling 13-week cash view, I can't tag transactions in a way that maps cleanly to how our budget is structured. My workaround has been exporting to spreadsheets and doing the heavier analysis there, which defeats the purpose of having a dashboard at all. Customer support, when I've reached out about this, has been polite but basically confirmed these gaps aren't going away soon.
For a solo freelancer or a brand-new startup, Wave is probably the right call. The price point is hard to argue with. But if you're scaling a team and need reporting that actually reflects how your business is organized, you'll hit the ceiling fast. I've stayed with it partly out of inertia and partly because migrating accounting history is a pain nobody wants. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement.
